Late-night comedy hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert took their travelling carnival barker act to TV live on U.S. election night, as promised.

And on a night when supposedly disengaged younger voters — voters aged 18 to 29, Stewart and Colbert’s core audience — went to the polls in unexpectedly large numbers, The Daily Show and Colbert Report hosts delivered two entirely different programs that were more subdued and, surprisingly, more disciplined than their norm.

The vote among younger voters many pundits believed wouldn’t bother to show up at the polls went overwhelmingly to incumbent President Barack Obama, by more than 60 per cent according to figures on the more staid, conservative CNN.

And while cause and effect are hard to measure, there can be little doubt that the late-night talk-show hosts and comedians had a more dramatic effect on the election conversation than at any time in the TV age. In the waning days of campaigning, Obama appeared on numerous late-night programs while avoiding — some might say ignoring — the traditional news programs, much to the annoyance of the U.S. White House press corps.

The equivalent in Canada would be if Stephen Harper courted 22 Minutes and The Rick Mercer Report, and ignored Question Period.

The bigger issue, as noted by Daily Beast media analyst and former Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz in his weekend CNN program, Reliable Sources, and reiterated again on CNN’s election coverage late Tuesday, is that millennials are now the largest voting bloc in terms of the general population, and they are more engaged politically, at least in the U.S., than any of the supposed experts gave them credit for.

Stewart’s live show, dubbed Democalypse 2012 — Election Night 2012: This Ends Now, opened with guest announcer Patrick Stewart (“Make it so!”) introducing a roster of high-profile guests, including “Anderson Cooper and his golden saxophone,” few of whom actually appeared in the live broadcast.

Instead, the Daily Show host read some of the election announcements – Democalypse 2012 was broadcast live at 11 ET on Comedy Central and repeated an hour later on CTV — to raucous applause from his studio audience.

“This is the night Americans go to polls in the millions to cast their vote,” Stewart said, pausing for effect before adding, “Which will be contested the next day.”

Pundits expected the key swing state to be Ohio. Early in the evening, though, it became clear that the state to point the way to the eventual outcome would be Florida.

“Florida,” Stewart said. “Where Cubans go to live and Jews go to die.”

Daily Show sideman John Oliver then weighed in with his expert analysis from social media sites, remarking early in the live broadcast that he had just received a tweet from a voter claiming to have voted for the GOP challenger, Mitt Romney.

“If that single tweet means anything,” Oliver said, with bold fearlessness, “get used to saying President Romney — because he’s going to win by a landslide.”

“Mitt Romney won most of the Confederacy,” he noted moments later, adding, “The first person to 270 (electoral votes) wins the ability to bomb Iran.”

Daily Show faux media analyst and number cruncher Wyatt Cenac then appeared with a flowchart, projecting that in 2016 Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton now has a 68 per cent advantage over Republican challenger Jeb Bush.

Following comedy bits featuring regular correspondent Samantha Bee — the third in her three-part series on a high-school election student president — and Stewart engaging in conversation with a hologram of George Washington, a dig at CNN’s 2008 election night coverage that featured a hologram of rapper and noted Obama supporter Will.i.am, Stewart closed his broadcast by saying that The Daily Show would return Wednesday with its regular non-live taping.

“I might even shave and take a shower,” Stewart said.

True to his more satirical roots, mock conservative pundit Colbert was in a sharper, harder-edged mood: His live broadcast, A Nation Votes: Ohio Decides: The Re-Presidenting of America: Who Will Replace Obama ’012, opened with a cartoon animation of an elephant punching a donkey in front of the White House, and devolved from there.

Ironically, for a faux news program and for a late-night comedy host who has always operated in the shadow of Stewart, it was Colbert who made the most important news announcement of the night: At 11:53 ET, he officially called the election for President Obama.

“We job creators are not going to take this lying down!” he shouted. “We’re going Galt, just like in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.”

Colbert then engaged in a faux testy exchange with his guest, conservative pundit and Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan.

“How do I stop Obama in 2016?” Colbert asked.

“You can’t,” Sullivan replied, playing along. “He’s a black man in power with nothing to lose.”

Sullivan admitted he spent much of the night following the election returns on Fox News.

“I watched Fox tonight,” he explained, “for pure schadenfreude.”

“Oh now you’re just talking European,” Colbert said, with mock irritation. “Please tell your liberal friends I will see them in hell.”

“That’s a high price to pay for a brief moment of political gain,” Colbert told viewers, in closing his live broadcast. “And I, for one, am happy to have you pay for it.”

The business of politics is not funny, but in this election the late-night comedians had a field day.

As noted liberal and Obama supporter Bill Maher said, in his Real Time program on HBO: “This election has been like watching Donald Trump lose a hockey fight. I know it has to end. I just don’t want it to.”

Until next time, then.

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